A Place to Stand

by Jimmy Santiago Baca

  Macaron suddenly put his arms in a headlock around my face, which forced my eyes down, and I saw blood all over my shirt. I was trying to talk. I put my finger in my mouth, feeling for something stuck in it. I realized I had chewed my tongue and it was bleeding profusely. Chicanos surrounded me, pushed me at a run toward the exit gate on the field. Then the guards took me away.

  I don’t know when or how, but I was taken to the infirmary. When I regained consciousness, I was in my cell, my face wrapped in gauze. A leather strap kept me from opening my mouth. For a couple of weeks my tongue felt like a towel, stuffed in my mouth. I quit eating and, in my haze, sat all day on my bunk, listening to Elvis standing at the bars singing rock-and-roll. When, three weeks later, they finally forced an intravenous tube in my arm, I was so weak I couldn’t even shout, let alone resist. Hooked to the I.V., I began to get clearer. I could hardly move my tongue. I tried to eat oatmeal and managed to swallow a little, but I was still afraid to chew. I got so tired of not being able to talk or chew my food that I tore off the leather strap and gauze.

  Elvis told me they were putting medication in my food to make me lethargic. He said he’d seen them do it before, so that prisoners would go along with the program.

  Unable to think clearly, had they continued, I probably would have gone along with anything they wanted. I would have been a good prisoner, had it not been for my need to speak.

  ELEVEN

  It was late summer 1977, and I was twenty-five years old and had less than a year to do. Because of mandatory laws for drug possession, many more young prisoners were coming in with longer sentences, and the prison population had exploded, doubling in the last couple of years and far exceeding prison capacity. Nobody was single-celling. Overcrowding was so bad that Nut Run was moved from DC to CB1 because there were no cells for incoming convicts. With no more Nut Run, half the mentally ill cons had been dumped in Ad Seg on both sides of the block, and the rest were sleeping between the bunks in dorms under the cell blocks in general population.

  Even I had a cell mate now. It had been almost five months since they had moved us here. There wasn’t enough room for Tom and me, so I bunked on top, staying up there plucking my guitar and writing poems. Every time Tom used the toilet, his intestines came out of his anus and he bled profusely. I couldn’t bear the smell or the sight of him standing there scooping his intestines into the bloody cloth he used to wrap around his crotch and waist to hold his guts in. I was no doctor but I knew it was bad, but he wasn’t in the infirmary because the prison doctor didn’t think so. Tom was in his late forties, weighed three hundred and fifty pounds, and slept on the floor because he was too big for the bunk. He’d been a pro wrestler, a fall guy in gangster-run clubs, and his cauliflower ears, mashed flat face, crushed nose, scarred arms, huge stomach, and bull shoulders testified to it. His brain, too, was damaged. His smile was crooked, his blue eyes dull, his speech slurred, but given all this he had the innocent candor of a likable adolescent. We lived together as best we could until one day, after I had returned from the exercise field, he was gone. He had had complications with his intestines and died. I felt sorry for him because his job in life had been to make a fool of himself, to lose, and his reward was only the mindless crowds screaming for his destruction.

  I often thought of Tom when I heard the cooing pigeons and prairie doves roosting in the cell-block rafters. They awoke and chirped wildly when the lights came on in the morning. They had forgotten what a real sunrise and sunset was. They lived under industrial corrugated metal and creosote rafters and awoke to a fluorescent sunrise.

  While most guys classified on Ad Seg were there for fighting or contraband, I was still refusing to work. So many cons were on lockup that there was a shortage of help, and instead of feeding us in our cells, we got to go to the mess hall to eat. After the evening meal, at mail call the guard left letters on my bars. I was corresponding with a woman, named Virginia, introduced to me by Norman, who was also still writing and sending me books from publishers, small poetry magazines, and other periodicals. The one letter I never expected to get, though, was from my tia, Jesusita, my father’s sister.

  She’d always been quiet, almost invisible and very religious. The last time I’d seen her was in Estancia when I was a teenager. Mieyo had given my address to my sister and she’d given it to my tia. I still had conflicting emotions about Julian, her husband, who had forced us to go to the orphanage. In her letter she said she was still in touch with the Saint Anthony nuns. The orphanage had closed and been converted into a Job Corps office, and the Franciscan nuns were relocated to Indian pueblos around New Mexico. I wrote her with a message for Sister Anna Louise—that beating kids was not the way to handle misbehavior. I also asked for any information about my parents. Had she heard from them? Where did they live? What were they doing? When Aunt Jesusita wrote back with my dad’s address in San Francisco, there was no mention of my mother. That was no surprise, because she’d never forgiven her for leaving.

  I had a million questions. But as I sat down to start a letter to my father, every memory I had was a sad one: anger, drunkenness, violence. I couldn’t think of a single time when we were happy together. I finally just kept the letter short and cordial. I was afraid I might make him back off. I had changed from the son he had scarcely known but as I wrote on wide-lined paper, choosing the simplest words, so he could understand, I became a little boy again, hoping for love and affection. I apologized for being in prison but assured him I was fine and getting out soon and I loved him very much. I kept it short because he was illiterate. Writing him gave me hope, and I dreamed of leaving prison and living with him someday.

  I waited anxiously for weeks and no reply came. I wrote my tia to confirm the address. She wrote that he had been admitted to a detox center. That was good. I was reconnecting with my father and my tia, I was writing and had friends who were poets, and we were finally being allowed to go to the big exercise yard. Three times a week, after getting scanned at the checkpoint, I’d cut briskly to the right from the column of cons heading to the courts and bleachers on the left and start running around the circular dirt field. Fifteen times around made three miles, and I’d used up every minute of my time outside.

  Sprinting hard for a long time, I’d fall into running reveries, my mind soaring above the prison, basketball courts, over the heads of sparring boxers on the field, gliding across the expanse of grass and the baseball field and beyond the rows of cons bending with short hoes in the vegetable rows as guards cradled carbines on horses behind them. My reveries always concluded with seeing my father and me together, living in a small apartment, taking evening strolls, and spending at least two months traveling in Mexico.

  I came back from the field one day to find a letter from my father on the bars. It was written on a hospital pad with a unit nurse’s name on it from the detox center. I was very careful with the envelope—his fingers had touched the paper, and mine touched where he had touched. I didn’t want to tear it, so I heated some water with an electric tong used to boil water for instant coffee and unsealed it. It was just a few lines conveying his love and the news that he would be leaving the detox center soon. His handwriting was shaky, the simplest words misspelled, the tone apologetic.

  After lights went off in my cell and the cell block quieted down, I would imagine my father in San Francisco as the evening bus deposited him at the corner. I concentrated hard in the dark to imagine him walking up and down the rolling sidewalk, carrying a paper grocery bag under his arm containing a loaf of bread, a package of bologna, and a fifth of Seagram’s. I imagined him in a small room with a bed and dresser, rented by the week. The bottle would be empty, he’s passed out, and then in the morning after shaving he would slap Old Spice on his face. In my mind, I followed him back to the bus stop and accompanied him downtown to another day of selling shoes. I thought how all his life he’d been a loner, and he was more alone now than ever, with no friends or social life, desperately existing on the th
readbare hope of accidentally running into my mother. It never happened, though, and his life would always revolve around work, liquor store, and boarding room. And as the guard swept his flashlight across my face on his hourly head count, I imagined myself waiting for my father on his building doorstep. I imagined so many times that we would sit in a house and talk like father and son, and all I imagined myself doing was listening to him, hearing him talk about his growing up as a boy in Estancia, and asking him for tips on shooting pool.

  After running one day, I stopped in a circle with others watching two fighters in a ring. The black guy was good, but the gringo was blocking and counterpunching, ducking, jabbing, sliding in and out. He finally connected with a solid uppercut and laid the black guy out. The gringo then entertained us with hand speed on the bags, sweating in the sun, shinier than a new nickel, his gloves blurring against the body bag, grunting as he smashed blow after blow into it.

  He grinned. “Any of you feel lucky, wanna try the roulette wheel?” He slapped his gloves, challenging us.

  Without warning, a Chicano gangster standing next to me nudged me enough to make me step forward a foot to gain my balance. I stepped back immediately, but I had already caught the gringo’s eye. He turned like a snow leopard responding to a slight movement in the grass.

  “You want some?”

  “Yeah, he wants some, you clown,” retorted Chelo, the gangster who had “accidentally” shoved me. He started pep-talking as my impromptu manager. “Kill that meth-fed crackbrain sonofabitch.” Chelo took the gloves from the black guy, pushed them on my hands, and laced them.

  “I got a carton on this homie. I’11 go two for one! Baby, jot ‘em down.” As Chelo’s girlfriend started taking bets, he said to me, “Let him clown around, do his little three-ring-circus bit, and then roundhouse him. ¡Snapeate, bro! Get in there and take care of business. Do the drive-by and quit o-zoning!”

  Caston, the black trainer, a nationally ranked light-heavy boxer, hit the bell. The gringo’s hips, arms, head, feet all moved in different directions. He bobbed, weaved, slid in and out. I covered my ribs with my elbows and my jaw with my gloves to minimize the damage. To impress and entertain the cons with his speed, he came at me with a machine-gun succession of jabs, glancing off my gloves but still jarring me. He had style but no slugging power. I measured him through an opening in my gloves, waiting, anticipating. Flaunting his footwork, he dropped his hands at his sides and shook his gloves, showboating for the fans that he didn’t even have to guard himself. I stepped in and bombed him with a left, a right, and another left. I moved through him with each punch, and he went down.

  Caston leaped off the bench in the equipment dugout. “Man, what a left! Where’d you learn that shit?”

  I declined Caston’s offer to join his crew of boxers. I didn’t need to have every young buck who came through the main gates wanting to take me on to get a reputation. I was content with the couple of cigarette cartons Chelo had given me after the fight.

  I didn’t know Chelo before that, but I’d seen him and I didn’t trust him. I’d heard he’d been one of the Inner Circle mafia bosses but was now their enemy. He was short but stocky and muscular, in his mid-thirties, with slicked-back black hair, blue oval sunglasses he never took off, not even when he went to bed, and a contrary demeanor that had helped him survive doing time at Marion, San Quentin, Folsom, Huntsville, and now Florence. He was a heroin addict and sported the baddest gangster walk, talk, and attitude. Not only were his back, chest, and arms covered with tattoos but tattooed teardrops dripped down his cheeks beneath both eyes. Meticulously cuffed and pressed blue jeans edged over the shoelaces of Stacy street shoes that glimmered with a spit-shine polish; his shirt was always perfectly creased; not a strand of hair was ever out of place. He had money on the books and cardboard shelves brimming with candy, cigarettes, doughnuts, and sweet rolls. He hustled everything and everyone, his stereo blasting Chicano songs and his color TV booming out sports games. His “girl,” a long-limbed blond-haired darling called Tish, was always at his side. A foot taller than he, in tight jeans, high heels, and implants, she had had a contract put on her by the inner circle of La eMe for stealing drugs. They had ordered Chelo to make the hit. He had stabbed her with an ice pick close to the heart, enough to get her to the hospital but not kill her. He’d hoped the attempt would fulfill his obligation but it didn’t. They put a contract on him. After count time at night, they’d carry on like teenage lovers, squealing and giggling; at other times they argued and fought like an old married couple.

  As our friendship grew, he’d say, “Don’t be so serious. Smile once in a while, let go and be happy.”

  After jogging, I would usually walk with Chelo. He began teaching me Chicano slang, Mexican/Indian words originating from Mayans, Olmecs, Aztecs. When combined, these words created our own distinct Chicano language, a language truer to expressing and describing my experience. In his early juvie days he had learned from older cons how to tattoo, and he’d done it for more than twenty years. His tattoos were like a walking library. He explained the significance of the turquoise Quetzal bird with expanding wings on his right shoulder, its feathers radiating red and blue rays in all directions. It was an Aztec sacred bird, its feathers more honored and valuable than gold or jewels. They were worn in priest headdresses and warrior shields. The jaguar, he said, lifting his arm to reveal a jaguar whose legs and head moved when Chelo flexed and unflexed his muscles, was a sacred animal. Holding class while we walked around the field, he shared with me the legends and folklore passed down to him from “pintos,” Chicano prisoners.

  I knew almost nothing about my culture and I was surprised by the extent of his knowledge. From history to language to politics, he had opinions on everything, and when he spoke he did so with a flair—his expression intense, his words passionate, his hands pointing or pounding or waving with conviction. He told me one day that to outsiders his tattoos symbolized criminality and rebellion. But it was not so, he said. “I wear my culture on my skin. They want to make me forget who I am, the beauty of my people and my heritage, but to do it they got to peel my skin off. And if they ever do that, they’ll kill me doing it—and that’s good, because once they make you forget the language and history, they’ve killed you anyway. I’m alive and free, no matter how many bars they put me behind.”

  Chelo’s stories made me think a lot. I couldn’t answer him when he asked if I knew the primary cause of death among our people. “Broken heart,” he said. The more I thought about it, the more it made me wonder whether my grandfather hadn’t died of a broken heart. Certainly my father drank because of a broken heart. When their dreams had been crushed, when their prayers seemed never to be answered, when life seemed to cheat them out of every glimmer of happiness, their hearts broke. And then alcoholism and despair set in.

  I guessed it was from thousands of broken hearts, and an attempt to mend them, that gangs started. Chelo had said prison gangs had originated in the early fifties with a guy named Cheyenne from Los Angeles. He established a group of Chicanos in Chino, a facility for young offenders, to study, educate themselves, stick together for protection, and help every young Chicano coming through the gates. He raised money to build small satellite educational sites throughout California where cons could meet and learn. The State of California labeled the meetings as gang gatherings and shut them down. They took to meeting in prison yards, mess halls, and barbershops, on tiers and in churches. Hundreds and hundreds of new Chicanos were signing up every month, and within a few years, ten to fifteen thousand Chicano inmates were part of self-help groups designed to help each one succeed in life.

  “Drugs, compadre, drugs,” Chelo had said. “Every time. I seen guys kill their brothers for a fucking gram. That ain’t a man, that’s a spread-legged junkie bitch with a dick. Twenty-five years I been doing time, and instead of getting together we kill our own. It was some rival gang that took Cheyenne out because he wouldn’t have anything to do with drugs.” />
  Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, after our discussions, I managed to fill my journals with ideas and sort out the information Chelo was sharing with me. I wanted to put some of it in my poems, use my time and energy to explore how it tied into my own family, and save it for later, when I was free to go to a library and do research. I’d grown up in an American society filled with stereotypical labels that discredited my people as inferior and lesser in moral character. Chelo went back to the beginnings, telling me that our people, the indigenous people of this continent, the Mayans, Olmecs, and Mexican tribes, were hundreds of years ahead of the Europeans in mathematics, agriculture, astronomy, literature, medicine, engineering, and aqueduct systems. Little by little, from our conversations, I began to see who I was in a new context, with a deeper sense of responsibility and love for my people. I wrote these poems during this time:

  6 AUGUST 1977

  Healing Earthquakes

  Through little garden plots I was enchanted by

  Nuns cultured at the orphanage,

  Through streets torn and twisted like gnawed bark

  I lived on like an insect,

  Through all the writers and artists of America

  Who never wrote my story,

  Through all the stately documents deceiving my ancestors,

  Quietly by itself are the Healing Earthquakes,

  From sides it comes

  Through the black-knotted drunkenness of my father,

  Through the cold deep bowels of hope,

  Through the trowels of sombrero’d bricklayers

  And wall-builders spreading the moist mortar,

  Through all the Chicanos in work T-shirts,